All Mobile Devices Will Soon Be Made Of Trees

Let’s see – how many mobile devices1 have YOU burned through since you joined the cell phone club back in the late 90s? Among all the Nokias, flip-phones, Razrs, Blackberries, Droids and iPhones – our own personal number is around 10 we guess.2

One of the many problems with our rock and roll mobile-device lifestyle is, of course, the question: where do our cast-off mobile devices go to die? In our typical head-in-the-sand fashion, most of us probably think/hope that our mobile device cast-offs are spirited off by technology disposal fairies who magically recycle, repurpose or appropriately dispose of all of the electronic bits and pieces.

Of course sadly there are no disposal fairies and the bulk (in the neighborhood of 152 million devices per year, according to a 2012 United States EPA report)3 of our mobile device castoffs and components therefrom are lying around in piles somewhere out-of-sight/out-of-mind polluting the hell out of everything.

But in happy news for tree-hugging hippies everywhere, published this week in Applied Physics Letters, researchers out of UW-Madison have successfully made transistors with biodegradable substrate made from wood, in lieu of the usual substrate of highly purified, not-even-a-little-bit-biodegradable silicon.4 And not only are these cellulose nanofibrillated fiber transisters biodegradable (“so safe that you can put them in the forest, and fungus will quickly degrade them”) relative to silicone-based transistors, but these new transistors display “superior performance” over their silicon cousins.

This all may be a bit day-late-and-a-dollar-short for all of the already-existing mountains of our cast-off cell phones, but buck up li’l camper and drink your glass of half-full: we’re one very much small step closer to just tossing our mobile device castoffs into the compost bin.

It seems the jury remains out on whether ipads, kindles and such count as mobile devices – there’s plenty of “Are not!” “Are too!” to go around. We’ll let those above our pay-grade sort that out, but we’re going to stick with mobile phones for the purposes of this article though we guess go with whatever your personal Jesus says falls under the banner of “mobile device.” ↩

Might we suggest a study correlating number of mobile devices and sexual partners over the course of one’s life? ↩